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Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

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Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#561

Post by JorgeGT »

sizzle wrote: post #372
avrionov wrote: post #299

Dropbox and Evernote, for me are two very similar companies. Startups that innovated on a great user experience and had a flawless execution in the beginning. I was an early adopter of both of them, and they worked well. Dropbox sync between different machines worked like magic. I still remember some of the nightmares my coworkers had with OneDrive in meetings when the files for the presentations were missing because…

Office 365 with MS Teams seems to have reached feature parity with Dropbox and slack in one nice suite of products that just work together seamlessly. You hit on an important insight, with O365 you can edit your documents right from the cloud and cross platform integration is tight with OneDrive and MS Teams. What does everything think?

I miss native OneDrive Linux support, but otherwise it is quite good. I can even avoid running office in WINE most of the time. And in Windows the experience is very nice, specially the on-demand file sync.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#562

Post by peddling-brink »

alecbz wrote: post #427
tshaddox wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe only if you constantly update "FAANG" such that every tech company who actually succeeds in creating a competitive or impactful product just gets their letter added to "FAANG," and all the companies that fail to make a huge impact automatically get considered "only features." We already see that a lot. Some people wedge Microsoft into the acronym and/or leave out other letters. And Netflix's product on the face…

Mostly agree, but Netflix isn't a feature just because Google and FB also do streaming. It's fair to call Netflix a product because it's something that end users actually care about for its own sake. You can pay for Netflix and nothing else and still get value out of it. Dropbox is just a "feature" in that you can't do anything with it on its own, you need to have some other data from somewhere else to use with it.

> Dropbox is just a "feature" in that you can't do anything with it on its own

That just describes a tool. A hammer is useless without a nail, but a hammer isn't a feature. The claw of the hammer is a feature.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#563

Post by chubs »

Spooky23 wrote: post #506
thinkharderdev wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that maybe Steve Jobs was right after all and Dropbox is a feature not a product. Dropbox file syncing is best in class but for the vast majority of users that is probably not the most important thing for them. Most people won't run into the hard edge cases that Dropbox has solved better than the others. And something like Google Drive derives it's value from he fact that is deeply integrated into GSui…

Maybe. I think the people who are most benefiting from Dropbox (creatives, etc) are heavily impacted by COVID recession. There is no business case for running Dropbox in a large enterprise (I tried... our creatives cried about it), and it's an increasingly difficult case to make for a home user, as all of the alternatives are pretty good. The other thing is that Dropbox is an easy app to fall out of love with as an i…

If you just want something to share files with your wife, I created an open source project that does exactly that: https://github.com/chrishulbert/flare/

Of course it's not as easy to set up as Dropbox, I originally had grand dreams of somehow turning this into a startup back when there were a lot of people upset that Dropbox was using an invasive kernel driver (IIRC), but I never found the time.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#564

Post by kumarsw »

thinkharderdev wrote: post #313
aeturnum wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of smaller tech businesses that could make a good living for a few hundred folks, but are extremely vulnerable to FAANG companies putting out a half-baked competitor. Strategically, from the FAANG perspective, it makes sense to spend a little money (for them) dipping a toe into every pond "just in case." On the flip side, it makes bootstrapping a sustainable business extremely difficult. If Google give…

The problem is that maybe Steve Jobs was right after all and Dropbox is a feature not a product. Dropbox file syncing is best in class but for the vast majority of users that is probably not the most important thing for them. Most people won't run into the hard edge cases that Dropbox has solved better than the others. And something like Google Drive derives it's value from he fact that is deeply integrated into GSui…

Probably Jobs was right, though I sometimes think of a better world where cloud storage and web apps are decoupled. No need to bother with Google Takeout because the data is already yours. I know that diagrams.net (formerly draw.io) does this but it's the only (major) web app I can think of which does.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#565

Post by person_of_color »

howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #44

Dropbox: - CPU runaway consumption on OSX. - Annoying off-on drive storage paradigm. - Annoying integration with other apps (eg. Excel). - Little differentiation from competition. - Poor integration with their other offerings (eg. Paper). But most importantly, a complete failure of vision and innovation. There are 5 or 6 initiatives they could implement now that would turn the tide.

Dropbox failed to go vertical. They need to sell a hardware storage device.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#566

Post by loehnsberg »

Unlike others in that space (I am looking at you, Slack), Dropbox is still innovating. Dropbox Paper is the best collaborative writing tool that I have at my disposal (O365, Gsuite, Overleaf being the others). I use it with coworkers all the time to draft things or just to keep notes. And hey, the .paper files are actually on my computer.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#568

Post by watermelon59 »

avrionov wrote: post #299

Dropbox and Evernote, for me are two very similar companies. Startups that innovated on a great user experience and had a flawless execution in the beginning. I was an early adopter of both of them, and they worked well. Dropbox sync between different machines worked like magic. I still remember some of the nightmares my coworkers had with OneDrive in meetings when the files for the presentations were missing because…

I hope those products have enough customers that think the way I do.

The reason I use and pay for Dropbox is that the primary focus of the company is to offer a product that syncs my files across multiple machines and keeps a copy of those files online. The have to do it well, or else they fail. It makes me nervous as a customer whenever I see them trying to "grow" by offering other products.

I don't trust Microsoft, Google or Amazon one bit with their competing products. Those are gigantic companies that don't depend on those working well, and they could kill them overnight.

The problem though is this mindset that everything has to constantly grow. That's what makes me nervous as a customer. I don't see what could be so wrong with building a product that works well and maintaining that long term, being satisfied with having a customer base that allows the business to be self-sustainable. If that customer base grows, great. More money. Otherwise, as long as it doesn't shrink to the point where it becomes unsustainable, it should be just fine. But often I have a feeling that that kind of feeling is verboten for tech companies.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#569

Post by spondyl »

ryandrake wrote: post #476
bayindirh wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dropbox is a feature not a product. I don't think so. It's a product which enables a lot of useful features on a variety of devices, including Linux desktops. No competitors of Dropbox enables the same functionality under Linux. This is why I use, and will continue to use it. Yes, iCloud just works and Google Drive works well enough, but none of them works on Linux. Nextcloud doesn't create too many problems but ne…

I thought HN established a long time ago that you could build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

I guess Drew never got the memo

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#570

Post by gsich »

tshaddox wrote: post #407
avrionov wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dropbox is a feature not a product. When you are against FAANG every product is just a feature.

Maybe only if you constantly update "FAANG" such that every tech company who actually succeeds in creating a competitive or impactful product just gets their letter added to "FAANG," and all the companies that fail to make a huge impact automatically get considered "only features." We already see that a lot. Some people wedge Microsoft into the acronym and/or leave out other letters. And Netflix's product on the face…

GMAFIA is a much better term. I don't see Netflix leading the tech world. Amazon and Google do videos too (as do others, Disney, CBS, HBO ...) so it's not that hard.
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